The Power and Toughness of Mana Value

So I play a game called Magic The Gathering(MTG). It is the collectible card game that started the the trend of booster packs with random assortment of cards in them that Pokemon and Yugioh later utilized. After learning more about statistics the past few weeks, I started thinking about what sets of data I could run some statistical tests on and a buddy of mine told me he would be interested in hearing about the relationship between a creatures power and toughness, and its mana value.

I started my adventure by looking online for a csv file that contains the card database for all MTG cards that have been printed. I came across a file I could download at mtgjson.com. I took some time and figured out how to upload the file to github so I could consistently have access to the data even if I was using my laptop. I had to do a lot of work cleaning up the data and getting rid of all the information that was not necessary. I narrowed down the card list to just sets that had been printed for draft use (so I did not include promos or small special sets) and I just selected creatures to be part of this test. Due to the fact that some creatures have symbols in their power or toughness that indicate constant change in those areas, I removed those creatures from the data set and am limited to using creatures with static values.

So after putting in all the data, I had the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between a creatures mana value and their power or toughness. With the returned information, I was able to reject the null hypothesis and determined that there is a positive relationship between a creatures mana value and how big its power or toughness is. I then decided to add in the rarity of the card to see if that had an impact. It turns out that it does have a little bit of an affect on the combat stats of creatures. As you can see in the pictures below, the line for “mithic”(the highest rarity) goes above all others though it starts in the same place.

In conclusion, while I can definitely say that there is a high degree of relationship between a creature’s power and toughness and the mana spent to cast it, there are still other factors to consider. Some of these could be:
Does it have an ability?
When was it printed?
What set is it in?
What creature subtype is it?
I also was not able to use all of the creatures in this test because of their dynamic stats. But overall, I enjoyed going through the data frame and getting results. I kept getting side tracked testing other things. It all felt like a giant puzzle that I got to find many different ways of putting together.